Minutes of the Football Club Committee

Not actually Minutes, just a resumé of the Committee’s reaction to proposals that the Chairman was foolish enough to be persuaded to bring before the Committee by Simon and Ariadne earlier in the day. I suppose it was inevitable, really: sport is fairly high on Simon’s list of Things I Would Rather Not Do If It’s All The Same To You; I should have been alerted to this when it emerged that he thought Henman was a half-man half-chicken superhero. So, to the proposals. The first was that the Club should provide topless cheerleaders to encourage the team during the match. I reacted to this with considerable enthusiasm and Simon displayed a rare empathy with such an obviously sport-related matter. His keenness dissipated somewhat when I suggested that, to save money, I could perhaps be one of them. The Committee felt that, whilst they would undoubtedly encourage the players, it would not be to play football. Not approved. The next was to use a duck as the ball. The Committee was less than receptive to this, firstly as the proposal seemed flawed in that the report failed to mention whether the duck needed to be dead or not and, dead or alive, a duck was unlikely to possess the bouncing qualities necessary to make a positive contribution to the game. Not approved. Next, the goalkeeper should dress up as a clown and dance the lambada during moments of inactivity. Amazingly, the Club was halfway to achieving this as the present incumbent’s performances gave the impression that he was dressed as a clown and he already danced the lambada incessantly, even during moments of activity. No approval necessary. Lastly, I put forward one of my own suggestions: that the traditional half time oranges should be replaced by flagellation with birch twigs. This was approved unanimously. So the two hours spent in the chatroom weren't entirely wasted.

A New Forest Pathway

…a picture of which I took, is now occupying a spot amongst a cast of thousands on the BBC Digital Picture of Britain thingy. I followed the example of Aoj and, well, there you are, and, in case you are remotely interested, here it is.

Tank goodness!

It was a momentous day down in the Forest yesterday when the paths of Loretta, el10t, el015e, Sam, MMM and the Milk Monster crossed mine – and it was deliberate – hurrah! It was great to put faces to names and to meet some more lovely people in the *ahem* flesh. We were getting a bit worried when it got to 1.45pm and MMM hadn’t turned up (she said she’d arrive by 1pm) but, apparently, she was held up by some soldiers near Salisbury. She thought she’d better not argue with them as they had really big guns on their tanks. Almost as scary as trying to order food from my line manager after 2pm! (it was a narrow squeak, I can tell you). We had a good chinwag and guffawed a bit (mostly at Sam’s jokes – not necessarily the punch-lines, actually, but perhaps more of that some other time!) and Jess learnt how to execute the time-honoured manoeuvre of getting to the top of the slide by walking up it instead of climbing the ladder, which is as yet beyond her capabilities, but only because of the size of the gaps between the steps (they are almost as wide as she is tall)! And, guess what, MMM encountered another tank on the way home, but this one let her through! We have lift-off!

Irregular Blogging and Bank Holiday Bouncing

I have recently mentioned somewhere else about the infrequency of this blog’s updating, and its sporadic nature is a constant source of irritation to me. I would like to be able to make a daily entry but I seem to have been conditioned to expect myself to write several hundred words instead of just a few dozen. Other people manage nice little chunks on a regular basis and they still make them interesting and/or humorous. Anyway, that’s enough whingeing for one paragraph. But I promise to try and make more regular entries, whatever their length. I was in charge of the Bouncy Castle at the pub last Bank Holiday Monday and I was sitting in the warm sunshine all afternoon without a hat. By tea-time, all my extremities were a bit red and I must have massaged a good half bottle of After-Sun Cream into my noddle when I got home – it certainly stung for a bit if I touched it! Loretta came and visited me for a couple of hours during the afternoon and, about halfway through the proceedings, felt it incumbent upon her to advise me of the caution needed to be exercised in acceding to the numerous repeated requests from little girls to put their shoes back on after their allotted bouncing sessions. Well, they kept asking me, bless ‘em! They obviously love me! And what little girl worth her salt would ask anyone to put her shoes on other than a kindly old…*ahem* Young Man with brightly-coloured extremities?

All fired up!

At the place where I worked, I was, for several years, a "designated officer" when an evacuation of the building happened to become necessary for whatever reason. There was a set procedure when the alarm sounded. You had to run down to reception (they never did tell us where to go if reception was on fire) and collect: (1) a little card with a particular task printed on it, and (2) a bright yellow tabard. There were several disadvantages to being selected for this job:- if you didn't time it right and purposely hung back to get 'Task No. 8 - Using fireman's lift, ensure all decent looking typists are taken out of the building then take the best one out for a roistering good time', you’d have probably ended up with ‘Task No.5 – Find all suspicious-looking bombs and defuse them by cutting either the blue or yellow wire [good luck with the choice], then station yourself at the south-south-easterly footway access point, reference AP.9, to prevent the public entering’. Also, there were never any XL tabards (you needed XXXXL in winter when you were wearing a thick overcoat as well and everyone used to laugh while I struggled to don an item of clothing (luminous to boot) that had probably last been worn by one of the Seven Dwarves, whilst running round trying to borrow some wire-cutters and desperately wondering where south-south-easterly footway access point AP.9 was). And nobody ever told you when the emergency (most often caused by a workman in the basement smoking a large cigar) was over, so you paced up and down at the entrance to the rear car-park for several hours trying to placate a growing (I think I might mean growling) queue of foot-tapping members of the public. And you couldn’t do sensible things like vital last-minute shopping while everyone was milling about by the War Memorial. It didn’t seem to matter if you went missing because nobody seemed to have the faintest idea what was going on and who was supposed to report that so-and-so was still in the toilet (“Sorry, from the sound of it, they couldn’t be interrupted. Evacuation, though an entirely appropriate word in the circumstances, would have been taken out of context”) or out on a site visit or on holiday or standing in another Department’s specified assembly point. I could go on. And you didn’t get paid. Talk about unsung heroes!